Peter Sullivan reports for The Hill about a potential major change to the Medicaid program.
The Trump administration is preparing to release guidelines soon for requiring Medicaid recipients to work, according to sources familiar with the plans, a major shift in the 50-year-old program.
The guidelines will set the conditions for allowing states to add work requirements to their Medicaid programs for the first time, putting a conservative twist on the health insurance program for the poor.
Democrats are gearing up for a fight, likely including lawsuits, arguing the administration is trying to undermine ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion on its own after Congress failed to repeal the health-care law.
The changes represent the vision of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who has long worked on conservative Medicaid changes.
In a speech in November hinting at the coming changes, Verma criticized ObamaCare for expanding Medicaid to “able-bodied” adults and said that group of people should be expected to work.
“Believing that community engagement requirements do not support or promote the objectives of Medicaid is a tragic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations consistently espoused by the prior administration,” Verma said. “Those days are over.”
